Book Review: How Life Works – A user's guide to the new biology

How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology
By Dr Philip Ball
Published by Picador Books
ISBN-10: 1529095980, ISBN-13: 978-1529095982
Buy this book from Amazon UK

DNA has a special place in our culture, compared to other molecules which are just as essential for life. Because DNA encodes certain components necessary for an organism to exist, and is passed down from parent to child, it is often incorrectly regarded as a sort of blueprint for what we look or act like (as I discussed in my last review, see BioNews 1224).

Still, you are probably used to hearing 'it's a lot more complicated than that'. If you have tried to pursue research yourself, this becomes particularly obvious. How we think about DNA and how life works is slowly changing, to build a more informed picture. But what exactly should this new – 'more complicated' – idea of the mechanisms underlying life look like?

How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology, by Dr Phillip Ball, is an ambitious attempt to tie together the loose threads underlying this problem, summarising the state of the relevant modern biosciences as well as providing a broader framework. An award-winning and prolific science writer, Dr Ball has published 28 previous books on topics as diverse as water, German physicists under the Nazi regime, and the neuroscience of music. He also has a PhD in physics from the University of Bristol, and worked as a Nature editor for more than 20 years.

Dr Ball explains early in the book that our DNA (genome) contains a sequence that encodes all of the proteins that our cells need to make, in order to function and build an overall body, with the sections of our genome that encode an individual protein referred to as genes. Genes are used to make a molecule called RNA through a process called transcription, which in turn is used as a template to make the encoded protein (a process called translation). This whole process is still commonly referred to as the 'central dogma', which perhaps speaks to a certain inflexibility in the way we think about it.

This central dogma tells us that differences in our genomes, together with the environment we grow up in, can explain certain differences between people (such as our appearance or susceptibility to diseases). However, Dr Ball argues that while DNA is an important part of the story, it is impossible to answer some of our biggest questions about health and biology without looking at it as just one part of an even more complicated system.

Indeed, as Dr Ball notes, 'a genome can't build a cell. Rather, the cell is a precondition for anything the genome can do.' In other words, without a cell that can recognise genes and use them to make protein, DNA becomes just a molecule that cannot be said to carry information.

RNA is one of the other parts of the system that Dr Ball discusses. Many RNA molecules are not actually involved in making protein, but rather regulate whether genes are used by a cell. As Dr Ball notes, only 'two percent at most' of the human genome is protein coding, while likely at least ten times that encodes regulatory RNAs, with many disease-associated DNA mutations being found in these regions.

It is also very unusual to be able to say that any one gene solely determines any aspect of ourselves. Instead, combinations of gene activity alongside the actions of regulatory RNA and protein determine how cells act. How organs and bodies are formed is even more complicated, with many cells working together to generate tissue in ways that often depend on physics – and even chance – as much as DNA. Taken together, Dr Ball suggests that DNA could be seen as an important 'resource' that organisms use, rather than being seen as 'instructions'.

The book covers an extensive range of topics including the central dogma, developmental biology, epigenetics, systems biology and mathematical modelling. As someone who completed an undergraduate degree in biology in 2018, I felt like I could see a précis of my degree within the book, alongside more recent advances.

It is impossible to do justice to all of Dr Ball's musings within the scope of this review. However, he creates a clear overall argument for a model of life that does not view DNA as a manual that can be 'wrong', and in which diseases or differences in health are natural outcomes rather than errors.

This doesn't mean giving up on understanding health, but rather – as he puts it in the chapter on human disease – 'it's a question of finding the right perspective', focusing less on finding a causative error to correct and more on how diseases arise.

Ultimately, the book is what its subtitle says – a user's guide. While I do not think a reader would need a specific background in biosciences to enjoy the book, it would certainly be helpful, as would a certain level of STEM education or knowledge. The book is extremely dense – I meant it when I said that at times it feels like it covers an entire scientific undergraduate degree, and more besides.

On the other hand, I would strongly recommend the book to any researcher, PhD student or medic – in fact, anyone with a background in science. I genuinely wish that it had been available when I started my PhD. The wider perspective that Dr Ball offers on the state of biosciences in the modern era, and some of the philosophical points he raises about what we should consider when we talk about life, are essential for any user to think about.

Buy How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology from Amazon UK.